That thought is not unique to tax law. In
my experience of more than 3 years doing what I call “applied dispute
resolution” which correlates with law research and paralegal activities I see
that in any area of law, social matters, environmental, humanities, economics
and others we can witness increasing level of challenges that our society face.

Let’s take as an example The Law.

Carefully crafted legal framework is one
of the essentials of contemporary society. However what we see is:

- Growing complexity of legal system.
Even some regular activities that are related to private or common property and
should be easily resolved take

a) law specialists, because legislation and
common law in those areas are so tangled that usually people don’t take any
action at all even if they are right;

b) time and effort incompatible with the
perceived risk of uncertainty when dealing with matters regarding property,
rights and wrong doings.

- Growing costs of people who interpret
the law to others and of the whole justice system. As a consequence we are
getting increased entry level to achieve so-called justice.

- Increasing number of issues that
current legal system cannot resolve at all in the current state of affairs
within the society.

- Too much interpretation is required,
because laws and their implementation are complicated.

If there is a dispute during any social
interaction there is a couple of options:

i) come up with an agreement that suits
all parties without getting to legal system

ii) get to legal system as an authority
to help resolving the problem

Agreement is impossible in situations
when all parties keep their positions tightly. If responsibility is higher than
minimal, i.e. involves large sums of money or big effort to undertake –
responsible party will avoid agreement at all and make everything necessary to
extend the period allowed to act responsibly in a hope that other parties would
give up.

In this case the winning party is the one
with more strength, ruthlessness, financial and human resources, courage and
network with various other entities including government agencies. Therefore in
majority of potential cases that should be resolved by legal system people or
companies who feel oppressed and bullied by others don’t do anything and just
accept the situation as is. This approach doesn't improve either their
lifestyle or the society in general and is simply wrong.

Consider a couple of examples.

Some government agency allegedly breaches
legislation. All the legal research is done by affected party and documents
supplied to the agency with explanation of why the legislation considered
breached in that case with references to statutes etc. Response from the
government agency is: we did everything right if you think otherwise go to the
court. Court process was estimated to come up around $12000-20000 without limit,
which straight away puts the offended party into a position where legal system
bestowed upon us is not an option at all.

Another matter is relevant to the
situation when damage is done to the property and is documented, but the
legislation does cover the wrongdoer from any charge or makes the procedure too
expensive and complicated for the damaged party to try and get remedy. A
residential tenant caused water damage to the unit below the one he occupied.
It was pointed out to him in person and he agreed that it’s his fault. The
damage was reported straight away with photos to the strata manager of the owners
corporation and to the member of executive committee and the notification was
forwarded to the tenant’s agent. The tenant’s agent agreed in writing to
recover the damage and costs involved. Three days after the tenant’s agent
changed the mind and said that the tenant is refusing that it’s his fault, that
the owner of the unit below lied before and that they are going to fight. After
careful review of the situation the owners corporation strata manager suggested
that it will be almost impossible to get the remedy from the tenant, because of
existing laws and that it would take more money and time to try and chase up
the tenant than to just rectify the problem at owners corporation cost (all
owners).

The other type of matters arises from
strata living in Australia. At the moment there is more than 3 million people
live in strata schemes across the country which is more than 10% of population,
but from experience it looks like only a few understand
legislation in that area. This is not because the rules are wrong or not
effective – the rules are complex but the level of understanding is low.

Problems of complexity that is higher than changing the light globes take
months and years to resolve!

It’s just a couple of examples out of
multitude of others I had a chance to work with in the recent past.

Imminent growth of issues complexity is
faced by indefensible decrease in people's understanding of the issues and ability
to resolve them.

Well I have been thinking about this for a while and in my opinion the laws are not made complex so it "cannot be understood". The laws represent the nature of our social collaboration and relationships. Which means the laws just reflect the complexity of our nature. Therefore if we follow this complexity by just implementing mere representation of it in a legal case or statute or in the legal process we inevitably increase complexity. However I shall admit that there is a level of intervention into the natural process by people who would like to make this even more complex :)Our life is getting busier every day and we just physically don't have an opportunity to catch up with that complexity unless we quickly close that gap somehow. By increasing our potential as humans, by spending more time doing intellectual work and not just work for biologically necessary things.

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